I was in Costa Rica all last week and had a couple of interesting things happen.

1) Monkeys really do fling their poo. And they have pretty good aim as well. We had monkeys outside of the house the entire trip and it was amazing.

2) My friends and I went down to a hotel for dessert one night. This place is in the middle of nowhere. We were eating and my friend looked behind him and sitting on a table was a copy of my Uberplay’s High Society game that people could play while eating. The only other games they had there was Rubikub. I was completely shocked as you can imagine. I would be shocked if I saw the game in the US but in the middle of Costa Rica – just bizarre.

Something I’ve been wanting to add to Tanga for a while is OpenID support. If you are new to OpenID, read about it here. Or here.

You can get an OpenID account from myopenid.com. If you have a Yahoo or AOL IM account, you already have an OpenID that you can use with Tanga.

If you have a Tanga account and an OpenID already, click on “Account”, then click on “Change Personal Information”. You can then type in your OpenID and you’ll be able to login to Tanga using it. Alternatively, if you don’t have a Tanga account but you do have an OpenID, click here to sign up using your OpenID.

I wish more websites used OpenID, and I’m glad to have Tanga throw its lot in with OpenID.

We just released a new look and feel for the web site and have made tons of small little fixes and additions to the site. Some of it is behind the scenes stuff that you wouldnât notice anyway but I thought Iâd mention it as TangaJoe and TangaJordan have been working like Monkeys to get this new site up!

To celebrate, we are going to be offering a $400 MSRP prize on tonightâs bottom feeder so come and check back tonight at 7:00 pst.

It is with heavy heart that we are saying goodbye to TangaJoe. He made a bad decision of posting some not-so-family-friendly pictures on the Picathon (some people might call them pornographic) so we are unfortunately in the horrible position of needing to let him go.

Joe has done some amazing things for Tanga over the past 18 months and we’ll miss him!

I’m giving Dinners Ready a spin. It’s not terribly expensive, about $35 per person per week of prepared dinners. (of course, you could cook your own for much cheaper, but with the baby, I’m feeling lazy)

Anyone have any experiences with services like that where you “outsource” part of your normal routine/chores to others?

Let’s have a vote to see what game you want to see on Tanga. We will pick the top two requests and buy a bunch of them to offer up to you.

Just so you know, on a lot of these new-release games, we don’t make any money – in fact, after credit card processing, boxes, shipping losses (we do lose money on $5.99 shipping), we actually go backwards on some of these new releases. But we do it in order to give you all a good deal.

If you do, post your resume here. It’s a very non-paid position. But it will help your career, no doubt about it.

You’ll get to have access to all the puzzles people have submitted, and will have the powers to nominate them as featured content, approve them straight to the archive (i.e. non-featured), or reject them (and explain why you rejected it).

You’ll also have the power to approve/reject submitted random questions, and mark comments as being naughty. And you’ll get to lord your deserved superiority over the rest of us.

You can see some of the pictures I took on my flickr page. I don’t know anything about photography and this camera is such a huge step up from the Point and Shoot one I used to have. The pictures I’m taking don’t suck quite as much.

So, camera talk! What’s good reading for beginner photographists? What have you found useful?

I’m still on a baby high this week, my son Dashell (Dash) Clay Van Dyk was born last Friday (Pi Day!) and he is awesome. He even already has his own gmail and facebook account, got to start them off right, you know.

One of the things I’m looking of doing next is writing a facebook application for Tanga. There is one already written by the good man Scott Alden from BGG, but it’s pretty limited. For you facebook users, what would you like to see in the Tanga application?

Are there any other ways that we could integrate Tanga content into other sites?

It looks like we may have the Picathon working in IE 7 and IE6 now but we need some more testing to see what types of bugs might creep up. We would love it if you would join in and play some games and then post here with any new bugs you might see.

As many of you know, we are having a heck of a time trying to get the new Picathon game working with Internet Explorer. The solution we have come up with is to build the front end of the game in Flash so that it is compatible across all browsers.

We are looking for a person with experience with actionscript/flex/java and possibly experience with jruby. If you do, please contact me at jeremy at tanga dot com and we can see if we can work something out! We’d love to have a front end interface that works with all browsers so we can push this out for all of our users to enjoy…

Ok Tanganites – TangaJoe, TangaJordan and Refurdson have been busy creating a new and exciting game for you to play. If you want to be our guinea pigs and help us test this puppy, please point your web browsers to:

http://butthead.tanga.com:7010/picathon

And start playing! We have experienced some issues with IE so please let us know what types of bugs you have and what suggestions you have on making this game better by posting below on the blog.

Right now we only have it working on NON-IE browsers. Please play with Opera, Firefox or Safari (Windows and Mac)

As some of you may have noticed, it may have seemed like you are not getting the right amounts of points when you solve. I mean, 63rd to solve and you only get 10 points? What the hell TangaJoe?!

I found a bug (for nerds, in the Rails acts_as_list plugin) that doesn’t do ranking correctly. So, even if Tanga reported you as being 63rd to solve, if enough ties happened, you might have been actually 103rd to solve, in which case the 10 tanga points would be accurate.

In short, you all have been getting the right amount of Tanga Points, it’s just your ranking that has been reported incorrectly.

I believe I’ve fixed the bug and corrected everyone’s ranking. This also solves some weirdness with you being told that you are the 100th person to solve, but you see that 115 people have solved the puzzle.